View full sizeAssociated PressA photograph of Etan Patz hangs on an angel figurine, which is part of a makeshift memorial in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. For prosecutors, the work is just beginning after the astonishing arrest last week of a man who police say confessed to strangling the 6-year-old New York City boy 33 years ago in one of the nation's most bewildering missing children's cases. Pedro Hernandez, 51, was charged with second-degree murder in the 1979 death of Etan Patz, based largely on a signed confession he gave to detectives.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The former Fresh Kills landfill could be the final resting place of 6-year-old Etan Patz, whose disappearance from a SoHo street 33 years ago has haunted New York City.

But finding out exactly where Patz's remains might rest amid millions of tons of trash at Fresh Kills could be a nearly impossible task, a borough expert said.

And actually digging the remains out could be even tougher.

Former bodega worker Pedro Hernandez said he lured Patz with a soda on May 25, 1979, strangled him, put the body in a bag and eventually left it in an alley a block away.

Sanitation spokeswoman Kathy Dawkins told the Advance that if the agency did pick up the body in the trash, it could have ended up in Fresh Kills or could have been taken to an incinerator in Lower Manhattan.

Borough Hall environmental engineer Nick Dmytryszyn, who was part of the effort that closed the landfill and has worked on landfill-related issues here since 1990, said the chances of pinpointing the exact location of Patz's body in the landfill are nearly nil.

He said that every section of the landfill -- 1/9, 2/8, 3/4 and 6/7 -- was open at the time of the child's disappearance.

But he said that because Sanitation couldn't make any one garbage mound too high -- out of fear of creating a "garbage landslide" -- Sanitation would do round-robin-style dumping, alternately using one section for a time, then moving on to another.

Ms. Dawkins said that the agency is checking its written records to see which sections of the landfill were taking trash at the time of Patz's disappearance. She said she didn't know how long that effort would take.

"We can only surmise where the body would have been taken based on the timeframe," she said.

Dmytryszyn said that finding the spot where a load of trash bearing the child's body "was more metaphysical" an undertaking than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

He said if he had to guess, he would think that Section 1/9 would be the most likely resting place because that was the largest section used for dumping. He said that Section 6/7, directly across from the Staten Island Mall, was the least likely because not much dumping was done there.

"But everything is by word of mouth," he said. "They kept records by hand."

Ms. Dawkins said that Sanitation also has written records of which trucks picked up trash in which neighborhoods in 1979, and the NYPD is retracing Sanitation truck routes from that time.

The trail gets a little hazier if a private hauler picked up the body, she said. Little Etan's body could have gone to Fresh Kills or the former Fountain Avenue landfill in Brooklyn. It could also have ended up in a private landfill under that scenario.

She said she didn't know if private haulers took their trash to incinerators at that time.

Even if you could figure out what section of Fresh Kills the body could be in, Dmytryszyn said it would be a tall order to get permission from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to dig up any closed section of the landfill, some of which have been shuttered since the early 1990s.

"You just can't go and dig," he said, adding that it would be an "unbelievable engineering undertaking."

"You're talking about thousands upon thousands of tons of rotting garbage that's been there for 33 years," he said. "Where would you put it while you were digging? How would you sift it?"

At its peak, the landfill took in 22,000 tons a day of the city's trash.

He said, "You can't dig straight down. You'd have to shore up the sides, like a trench. It would almost be like strip mining."

The mound at Section 1/9 alone is 202 feet high, he said. Dmytryszyn did not estimate the cost of such an undertaking.

"I have no words to tell you of the images in my head, unearthing that much garbage," he said. "Words escape me."

And if investigators do dig up Section 1/9, they run the risk of disturbing an area that 9/11 families say contains remains of their loved ones lost at the World Trade Center.

There's also the question of what exactly investigators would be looking for, said Dmytryszyn. Hernandez has told police that he dumped the body in a plastic bag.

"We don't have the same kind of garbage bags now that we did then," Dmytryszyn said. "And what would the condition of the body be?"

Having any physical evidence could help police corroborate Hernandez's confession and put the Patz case to rest for good.

"I grieve for the family," said Dmytryszyn. "It's almost like they came to grips with one level of reality, and now they have a whole new horror to think about."

City Councilman James Oddo said he hopes it never comes to a big dig at the landfill.

"That would be hurtful to the family," said Oddo (R-Mid-Island/Brooklyn), "to go on some wild goose chase in a garbage dump."

The family, he said, is "looking for closure. That's the direct opposite of closure. I don't believe that people would think that this is something that would be good for the family or New York City. It's untenable."

Ms. Dawkins declined to comment on the possibility of digging up decades of trash at the landfill, and said Sanitation is "taking its cue" from the NYPD on the investigation.